More Quotes by Thomas Mann
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
